CAD-Skin: A Hybrid Convolutional Neural Network-Autoencoder Framework for Precise Detection and Classification of...

Skin cancer is a class of disorder defined by the growth of abnormal cells on the body. Accurately identifying and diagnosing skin lesions is quite difficult because skin malignancies share many common characteristics and a wide range of morphologies. To face this challenge, deep learning algorithms have been proposed. Deep learning algorithms have shown diagnostic efficacy comparable to dermatologists in the discipline of images-based skin lesion diagnosis in recent research articles. This work proposes a novel deep learning algorithm to detect skin cancer. The proposed CAD-Skin system detects and classifies skin lesions using deep convolutional neural networks and autoencoders to improve the classification efficiency of skin cancer. The CAD-Skin system was designed and developed by the use of the modern preprocessing approach, which is a combination of multi-scale retinex, gamma correction, unsharp masking, and contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization. In this work, we have implemented a data augmentation strategy to deal with unbalanced datasets. This step improves the model's resilience to different pigmented skin conditions and avoids overfitting. Additionally, a Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) algorithm is integrated for final-stage classification. Our proposed CAD-Skin enhances category recognition for different skin disease severities, including actinic keratosis, malignant melanoma, and other skin cancers. The proposed system was tested using the PAD-UFES-20-Modified, ISIC-2018, and ISIC-2019 datasets. The system reached accuracy rates of 98%, 99%, and 99%, consecutively, which is higher than state-of-the-art work in the literature. The minimum accuracy achieved for certain skin disorder diseases reached 97.43%. Our research study demonstrates that the proposed CAD-Skin provides precise diagnosis and timely detection of skin abnormalities, diversifying options for doctors and enhancing patient satisfaction during medical practice.